*August by Cake wasn't GbV's 100th release, but rather Bob Pollard's 100th release, inclusive of all solo albums and side projects.

He does. He's been alternating between "greatest hits" & deep cuts career spanning shows backed by his normal four piece band and then these techno-ish things with a DJ or even pre-recorded tracks providing the backing music, but even for the latter he'll play guitar on a lot of the songs.

Todd Rundgren's "Buy My T" is not criticizing people hawking overpriced merch, but rather pointing out that even veteran artists like him depend on merch sales to make a living. As always, it's good to listen to an album more than once (or at least once) if you're going to write a review of it.

Totally disagree. His shows are loose, but I've seen him "bring it" on a number of occasions.

I was shitting on FF in 2007.

Could be - I can't speculate on that, as I'm from the US and was either very young or not born when most of these bands were active (save for the Pixies and Fugazi). This is more or less my point, though. People often speak of these bands as if they are obscure, but most of them were at least reasonably popular in…

Yep, and the truth is (as I think others here have noted), all these really big cult(ish) type bands like The Mats, Husker Du, Big Star, the Velvets, XtC, the Pixies - whoever else you want mention like this - are, in reality, all pretty popular at this point, even if none of them are globally famous behemoths like…

Yeah, I don't think them managing themselves was a good idea, even if it was a noble idea. It certainly resulted in them getting screwed out of a lot of money they generated. To me, though, when the label can't press up enough copies of their records to meet the market demand or can't get the singles of a really,…

I think REM are an outlier to this general trend because they had four relatively intelligent guys who operated as a united front, were careful (and had good advisers), and mostly weren't on heavy drugs.

Yeah, well, again, it's like a lot of bands when they're young - they just don't know how to handle the business and/or media side(s) of things until they make some mistakes and go through it for a while and learn - unless they're lucky enough have some sort of handler or mentor that can help them early on. With…

From what I've read, the Smiths were, much more than the Mats it seems, screwed by their label, and also by the British print media. Maybe they shouldn't have signed with Rough Trade in the first place, but a lot of their problems were things they couldn't have controlled, even if they did make some of their own…

I know what you mean, it's just, where do you get that information from? I see that book as a big step forward compared to what information was previously available about Alex, but I can also see why you see it more as incomplete.

That's a fair point, but I think the reality of his life is that there were long stretches where he not only didn't do anything to speak of musically, but also where it would be tough to find any info on what exactly he was doing period. If those gaps could be filled, yeah, that would make for a better book, for sure.

Eh, I guess I used to think that way too - that more obscure but great bands were/are cooler than really popular great bands- but it's less of a big deal for me now. I don't blame anybody for still feeling that way, but I guess I care less about that just like I've started caring less about other people's opinions…

I thought the Chilton bio was quite good, it's just that it was a Chilton bio and not a Big Star book. It kept Alex's Big Star years in proportion to all the other things he did in his life (even though obviously many people have no interest in anything about him, musically or otherwise, besides Big Star).

Ah

I was born in 1974. I have no idea how the '60s were. The '00s, however, sucked.

I was born in 1974.

And what a shitty decade it was.

The Dixie Chicks got so much backlash for their anti-Bush rant on stage because they are (at least were) a country band, and country fans are predominantly conservative politically. While the Iraq War might not have been crushingly unpopular in it's initial stages, no one is surprised or shocked when a rock group…